What have we "learned" at school during the pandemic?

 

Over the past year, when I see so many “yuppie” types out riding bikes or jogging in the middle of the “work” day—or just “hanging out”—I wonder if this is what is called “working remotely.” People might say that there is less “distraction” working outside the office, but it is difficult to believe that to be true, especially with so many things to do (or not do) beyond the reach of supervision in an office environment. Unemployment might be inching closer to pre-pandemic rates, but that doesn’t mean actual “production” is up at the same rate across all sectors of the economy—and that underlines the relative quantitative difference between “virtual” and actual manual work, and how inequitable the compensation system is in this country.

And how is “remote” schooling working out? That depends on who you ask: parents of students who are doing well say it is “great,” and those who say their kids are not learning as well say it is terrible; students who have better access to computers and the Internet to do “remote” schooling obviously “learn” more than those who do not. Students who are good at rote memory can learn in any environment as long as they pay attention, but we are also told that students who have a tendency to “horse around” are deprived of the social environment of a classroom to do that, and thus forced to “focus” more on class work; ditto with “shy” or “hyperactive” kids. It certainly “helps” that grading is “relative” to the quality and quantity of what is learned as compared to the pre-COVID period.

On the other hand, slower learners may only fall further behind, although some defend this as “self-pacing.” A report in the Washington Post tells us that in classrooms with low-income minorities, there was more difficulty in keeping them “engaged”; at one point, surveys of teachers claimed that only 60 percent of students were “regularly participating or engaging in distance learning.” As much three-quarters of teachers claimed that “their students were less engaged during remote instruction than before the pandemic,” that this engagement declined further as time went on. Most students were in contact with their teachers “less than daily,” and one-quarter claimed that this was “less than once a week.” One student was quoted as saying that remote schooling was “boring and bland. I don’t think I’m learning.”

The Post found that in low-income schools, teachers spent most of their time “reviewing” previous class work rather than teaching new content, and “half of high-poverty school districts appear to be offering only ‘perfunctory’ instruction, compared to a third of wealthier districts,” which doesn’t exactly say much about the level of learning in those districts either. The focus on “reviewing” material is defended by one teachers union president as a “focus on welfare checks and on helping students retain what they already learned,” while others charge that by “doing the same old thing all the time” leads to “engagement problems.”

Despite the fact than most parents believed that schools were providing the necessary material for learning, many still believed their kids were falling behind academically. Obviously, while some kids prefer the freedom to do school work when they feel like it, others need the up close support from teachers and friends in the classroom. In a USA Today story, a freshman high school student in Milwaukee named Ruby Rodriguez found that “remote” schooling “made it exponentially harder for her to stay motivated and learn. Her grades have dropped from A’s and B’s to D’s and F’s. She stays up too late. She sleeps a lot. She misses her friends. Like millions of students attending school virtually, Ruby is floundering academically, socially and emotionally.” She is one of an “alarming number of kids falling behind, failing classes or not showing up at all.” Many students are literally a year behind in school work. According to Macke Raymond, director of Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, thousands of kids are “going feral,” are “unaccounted for, with no contact since schools have closed.”

The Stanford study last October, “Estimates of Learning Loss 2019-2020,” found that Tennessee had the highest learning losses in reading during the pandemic. And since we’re on the subject, we might as well discuss the topic of what’s going at the old school. It’s odd, but despite the world changing, some things remain the same, except that words like “diversity” are twisted to mean something else. Since I don’t want to just pick on that school, I want to show you a screenshot of “liberal” Seattle from the perspective of the main entrance of the University of Washington’s Suzzallo Library back in the "old" days:

First off, the students are real but they are playing extras in the 1965 film The Slender Thread. The lone nonwhite face here is actor Sidney Poitier, who would be considered an “extra” in real life on campus at the time. Fast forward today and this is what UW’s student body looks like:

I don’t care what people claim: this is not “diversity”—this is evidence of a “favored” group muscling-in on the turf of a “privileged” group.  Now, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville  is frankly one of the “whiter” schools around, and like other Deep South schools, it wants to keep it that way—because, after all, these schools were founded to serve the scions from the old plantation days. Those who find the presence of nonwhites beneath their dignity will let you know how they feel about it, one way or the other. In 2019 a UT freshman was “persuaded” to leave the school without any fuss after a snapchat showed him and another student in blackface accompanied with the caption “We for racial equality boys. Bout to get this free college now that I’m black let’s goooo #blacklivesmatter.”

But that was strictly low-tech; today there is “zoom bombing,” which refers to unwanted visitors hacking into the online teleconferencing program Zoom, and making a nuisance of themselves. It has been a problem for universities all over the country, and most incidents seem to have race on the brain. For example, last month UTK’s dean of students, a black professor named Shea Kidd Houze, hosted something called “Milkshake Monday,” in which students can get on Zoom and talk about their experiences at the university. During the “chat,” an “unknown guest” insinuated himself in the background making racial commentary, causing the “chat” to shutdown.

This wasn’t the first time this happened, and it seems that malign actors are taking advantage of the opportunity to make racist or anti-pandemic response commentary anonymously since schools began to conduct their business remotely during the pandemic. After a seeming “lull” in the “action,” the start of the new semester this year restarted the seemingly “random” attacks during online classes again. In February, the student newspaper, The Daily Beacon, reported that a Plant Sciences lecture was interrupted by three people, one who “had an explicit, explicitly racist screen name,” according to the lecturer, Andrew Pulte.  He noted that they “took control of the screen” and “put up disturbing images” while playing a repetitive recording of racist slogans.

As mentioned, this is also occurring in numerous other universities. Although it is not known who these people are, and schools have been eager to blame outside agitators, it is difficult to believe that all of this isn’t an “inside” job by white students who actually know when and where to launch these attacks. Given the publicity of the Black Lives Movement and protests across the country, it shouldn’t be surprising that students of a right-wing, pro-Trump bent would be engaged in these activities. The juvenilia of these people cannot be gainsaid, especially in other incidents across the country in which “bombers” took over screens with swastikas and depictions of genitalia.

But outside of these “distractions,” how are college students fairing in comparison to students in grade and high schools? Inside Higher Ed tells us that students miss the full college “experience” which makes them “excited to learn” and motivates them “to stay engaged in school” and “learn a lot more.” Although college students are “performing better than researchers expected,” Inside suggests that this is perhaps a chimera, since many schools have instituted “more forgiving” pass/fail options that reflect the level of learning actually done—which may not “translate” in the real world.